was awaiting her
by the hedge.

"How late you are!" he said, not reproachfully, but in relief that she
should have come at all. "I thought you must have changed your mind. Do
you know it is past eleven?"

"Have I been as long as that?" Blanche hugged herself to think that she
had been so genuinely wrapped in dreams as to let so much time slip by
unheeded. Together they went down the moonlit field, where the arishmows
seemed like the pavilions of a long-dead Arthurian host conjured up by
some magician's spells. In the last field before the moor Ishmael pulled
the corn out lavishly as a throne for her and installed her on it.

"You look like the spirit of harvest sitting there on your golden
throne," he told her, and, leaning back against the rustling stook, she
smiled mysteriously at him, all the glamour of the moonlight and her own
womanhood in her half-shut eyes.

"Blanche ...!"

He was kneeling beside her, his hands on her shoulders. Her eyelids
dropped before his gaze and she shook slightly.

"You are the most beautiful thing on earth! I love you with all my heart
and soul, with every bit of me. Say you can care--Blanche, say you can...!"

She raised her eyes: the sphinx-like look of her level brows and calm
mouth held for an instant, then her face quivered, grew tremulous and
tender. Her hands made a blind, passionate movement, and as he caught
her to him he heard her sobbing that she loved him.

He held her close, covering her face with clumsy eager kisses, the first
he had ever given a woman, and he gave himself up to worshipping her as
she sat on the throne he had made for her.

"Let us go to the boulders above the wood," whispered Blanche, who even
in the grip of one of the deepest feelings of her life kept her
unfailing flair for the right background; "we can see the sun rise
there, over the trees...."

He helped her to her feet and they walked together, hand in hand, like
children. The keen personal emotion had passed, leaving them almost
timid; now certainty had settled on them passionate inquiry gave place
to peace. So they went, and he felt as though he walked in Eden, with
the one mate in all the world. Across the moors they went; then--for
they were going inland--they came to fields again, and the path ran
through acres of cabbages. The curves of the grey-green leaves held the
light in wide shimmers of silver, the dew vibrating with diamond
colours; edging their two shadows the refraction of t